King of the Hammers: Blood From a Stone

Unruly and unsanitized, King of the Hammers is off-road racing's new wild west.

I drive south from Barstow, an outsider in a new Mercedes, past scenery from a Wile E. Coyote cartoon without the cacti and falling anvils, looking for a dirt turnoff. It's out here in the Mojave Desert, near Joshua Tree, though I'm not sure where. Before I lose cell reception, one final text message chimes in from a friend who knows the place.

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"Aim at the dust cloud."

Fifty-one weeks of the year, Johnson Valley, California, is home to some 440 self-identified "humble" residents. For seven days in February, that number swells to 50,000 and any semblance of humility goes straight to hell. There's classic rock and two-way radios and bootleg fireworks and Keystone Light. Then they go racing.

It's called King of the Hammers, and I'd seen it billed as the world's gnarliest off-road competition. I heard the attrition rate is staggering, that 80 percent of the grid DNFs. I heard that Robby Gordon showed up, only to be chewed up, spit out, and sent home. I heard about trucks climbing rock walls and cart-wheeling on the playa at 100 mph, and at a certain point, I stopped listening and went to see it for myself. What I found in the dust cloud was Hammertown, U.S.A.

Chris Cantle & Michael Darter

To enter, you drive several miles down a rutted turnoff from Old Woman Springs Road, past a metal scaffolding gate, and into a sepia dreamscape. This place is an anarchic off-roading utopia, all the momentum of an epic tailgate with the aesthetic of a refugee camp. Baja 1000 meets Burning Man. The labyrinth of RVs and tents goes on forever, no roads and no asphalt, simply a rough crisscrossing of dusty paths. Herds of lifted four-by-fours, sandrails, and dirt bikes go in every direction. The air has a gritty viscosity, and you have to shout over humming diesel generators. Dried creosote bushes crunch under my boots as I step out of a black Mercedes and into the white sun. There is a burned-out Polaris, and people are scavenging parts off it. There is a goat tethered to a trailer, and he's eating a cardboard box. There are no showers. There is no sleep. Welcome to the redneck Thunderdome.

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California has a long-standing history with outlaw off-road races, and King of the Hammers is as wild as they come. It mixes opposing disciplines: low-speed, hypertechnical rock crawling and point-to-point desert racing. The course is a poorly marked, vaguely terrifying thing that links a chain of boulder trails (collectively, "the Hammers") by way of flat-out sprints across dry lake beds. Drivers get 14 hours to complete three laps, a total of 215 miles. Racing starts at 8 a.m. and bleeds into the night, and conditions therein are exacting. Heatstroke warnings are often in effect. Sometimes it snows.

Chris Cantle & Michael Darter

There are 15 timing checkpoints, and missing any of them results in disqualification. The racing line is a sequence of scattered wooden survey markers. Straying more than 50 feet to either side results in disqualification, except where the race borders an active military base. Straying there is a federal crime.

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King of the Hammers is a run-what-ya-brung affair. Besides rudimentary safety regs for stuff like roll-cage thickness, there are two concrete rules: (1) All vehicles must be capable of trans- mitting power to four wheels with a functioning low range, and (2) all vehicles must carry enough water, food, and medications for its occupants to survive unassisted for 24 hours. That's pretty much it. Build an exact replica of Ironman Stewart's TRD Tundra. Build a fart-powered hot-dog cart. Whatever. This is legit unlimited-class wheeling.

That brand of racing is a big draw. The week begins with motorcycle and UTV races, qualifying, then the Every Man Challenge, where amateurs run a shortened version of the course. The big boy Kings finale is on Friday. It's all the brainchild of Dave Cole, a computer technician from New Jersey. He and Jeff Knoll, a plumber, came up with the idea at a Chili's in San Bernardino. They sketched the rough course on a cocktail napkin. Four months later, in April 2007, Cole and a dozen friends met up, peeled out, and took on the Hammers in secret. Afterward, he posted about the race online.

"It was all organic," Cole told me. "It just . . . grew."

The first official King of the Hammers ran in 2008 for 2500 spectators. The next year it was 5000. Then 15,000. Cole bought out Knoll's share in 2011. He no longer works on computers. This year's crowd was roughly the population of Sarasota, Florida.

Chris Cantle & Michael Darter

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At night, when the kegs run dry inside Hammertown, everybody rushes out to screw around on the course. I hop into a Wrangler and join the mass exodus, smashing across whoops and clawing up a sandy mountainside. At the peak, ledges jut two stories high, folding into a vee around a jagged sea of boulders. Below, a lifted gray Toyota pickup is fighting the impossible grade. Things are going poorly. The driver is flustered, thumping on the rev limiter. The dudes behind me are talking smack about his mom.

I sit next to a lanky, weatherworn gent in his mid-sixties, a veteran of both Johnson Valley and Khe Sanh. He clicks a Zippo and explains: Each of the Hammers has its own nickname. Aftershock. Wrecking Ball. Boulderdash. Tonight, we're at Chocolate Thunder, near camp. Besides bragging rights, the vet says, these boozy twilight parties shift the rocks around, throwing off pros who've been pre-running the trails. He calls it "keeping 'em honest." I ask about his favorite part of the race.

Chris Cantle & Michael Darter

"I like it when they walk," he says.

There aren't any support cars at King of the Hammers, and towing is verboten. So when a truck breaks—and everyone breaks, he emphasizes— drivers get out and wander to the nearest pit. There are only three past the starting line. He says it reminds him of the Bible.

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"Jesus Christ, will someone slap a winch on this idiot?"

Nobody does. And when the Toyota's driveshaft twists into a barbershop pole, the crowd lets out a collective sigh. There are no track officials, nobody in uniform. Two members of the pea- nut gallery clamber down to push the immobilized pickup. One loses his footing and falls, flailing in a rainbow of pilsner. A skyjacked UTV, its driver impatient and muscling through, nearly runs over the guy's skull. The coliseum erupts in laughter.

The evening before the race, I wander through Hammertown's shanty garages and check out the metal. The purse here is $25,000. There aren't any manufacturer teams, just privateers, fabricators and shop owners with pit crews assembled from friends and family. The trucks they build are nutty enough to run on Thorazine.

Chris Cantle & Michael Darter

Built Turbo 400 transmissions and stroker V-8s are de rigueur, but otherwise there's an astounding lack of parity. I see left- and right-hand-drive trucks, front- and rear-engine layouts, solid-axle and independent suspensions, and wheelbase variations of 20 inches. Curb weights range from luxury sedan to well-fed elephant. Aerodynamic considerations are theoretical at best and visibly counterproductive at worst. One truck has butterfly doors.

These are 129 different solutions to a single challenge. Trophy trucks aren't durable enough for the boulders; buggies are too slow for the 120-mph dry-lake-bed sections. What you end up with is a sort of hybrid between the two, wild tube chassis with crude body paneling on quad-bypass shocks the size of small mortar cannons. Each truck is a little window into the folks who built it.

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Chris Cantle & Michael Darter

This year is Jason Scherer's seventh time at King of the Hammers. He's ditched the navigator (along with his windshield) and welded an exposed radiator into the passenger compartment. He's making 750 hp and called the price of his truck's disposable components "obscene."

"It's literally like $30,000 every time you go to race," he says. "Everything's toast. From the power-steering pump to the steering rack to the transmission transfer case. Everything. You don't run a single U-joint over again. The shocks get so hot that the stickers will be blistered off by the time the race is over."

Later, I stop by Tony Pellegrino's campsite. His truck is CAD-designed and has handmade axles. When he fires up the 800-hp Chevy small-block for me, it idles like a dynamite orgy in an elevator shaft. The gearbox alone cost $16,000. Not that it matters, really. Five former winners qualified this year: two with straight axles and co-drivers, three in single-seaters with independent suspensions. Scherer, the dude with a radiator riding shotgun, took pole position. Nearly a decade on, everyone still looks for a proverbial silver bullet. Given the variables of mixed-discipline endurance racing on a course that reconfigures itself whenever there's a minor earthquake, I'm not sure there is such a thing. Basically, don't count out the fart-powered hot-dog cart.

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Chris Cantle & Michael Darter

Dawn breaks fast and hard in the Mojave, and on race morning I wake up to the sound of trucks starting. The grid snakes through Hammertown's white tents and motor homes, filling the place with raw noise. The ground shakes.

Spectating at King of the Hammers is a frenzied, madcap dash, following the leaders around the course. There's plenty of passing on the dry lake beds, but the real magic is in the rocks. Fans migrate in vehicular swarms, squeezing across the course in between racers, hopping from trail to trail. Each is a coliseum, like Chocolate Thunder, with a thousand people lining the escarpments. My day begins at Jackhammer.

The trucks are incredible in action. Funky, boxy bodies move like bobbleheads atop massive, chrome stilts. The suspensions creak and contort at inconceivable angles, a grotesque kind of crab walk. Axles and underbodies smash against the terrain with a percussive, metallic bang that makes my toes curl. In sports-car racing, you worry about the fragility of human beings, those little helmets poking out of carbon pods traveling at ungodly speeds. Here, it's the opposite. The driver is enveloped inside a 5000-pound jungle gym. But the trucks are in a constant state of risk, always liable to shear an axle or blow a transfer case to smithereens.

Chris Cantle & Michael Darter

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You begin to adopt that mindset, scanning each trail and outlining a path of least resistance. In doing so, you start noticing gradients of driver skill, how the best wheelmen are impossibly smooth. They don't run over the trail, they negotiate it. I watch them slice a neat incision through all the earthly clutter. Easy inputs. Steady speed. When they do get into the throttle, application is liberal and results are violent. Sky-high stalls and big power light up 40-inch tires with ease. Rock projectiles fly. Small-blocks yodel through the canyons. The crowds whoop and clap. But when the trucks begin to get stuck, everything goes haywire.

Fourteen miles away, at Remote Pit 1, Shannon Campbell leans against a snub-nose, single-seat truck. His arms are crossed defiantly, hands still dirty from pulling the transmission that just ended his race. He was the first man to be crowned King of the Hammers on two occasions. Somebody described Campbell's driving style to me as "barbed wire."

"He comes through here and does a big ol' donut, spitting gravel everywhere and kicking up my team's tarp," Campbell says in a matter-of-fact drawl. "He" is Randy Slawson. These remote pits are like Mississippi flea markets, rows of pickups, pop-up tents, and white plastic banquet tables littered with tools and spares. Each team's work area consists of a blue plastic lawn tarp. And apparently, you don't mess with another man's blue plastic lawn tarp.

Chris Cantle & Michael Darter

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"I walk up and say, 'Look here, you stupid sumbitch, don't let me catch you doing that again.' I mean, I like him as a person . . . " (Campbell then proceeds to list of the ways that he does not like Slawson.) "But stick him behind the wheel, and he does stuff like that. Stupid. Just stupid."

We're interrupted when another truck, No. 4418, limps into the pits. It's smoking. "Hey, that's my buddy Mike. Guys, it's Mike!" Campbell gathers his team, and a ragtag group of a half dozen sprints into action. They jog 50 yards, flashlights bouncing, work boots grinding over hard dirt, to where 4418 is puking coolant. Everybody crowds the rig in a crossfire of diagnosis and directives.

"Air bubble?"

"Maybe, or a coolant line."

"Nah, man, 7/16ths, not 11/16ths."

"Grab some Stop Leak."

"All we got's the liquid stuff, no powder."

"Will it hold?"

One crewman hoists himself onto 4418's back side, jamming a utility jug neck into the radiator, posed like he's planting the flag on Iwo Jima. Another scales a front tire and starts ratcheting on the light bar, also damaged. Five frantic minutes later, 4418 trundles of, making a tidy K-turn before roaring back into the desert. No donuts.

"Anyways," Campbell says, continuing, "once I get done giving him a talking-to, my crew tells me that's the second time he's done it today. Came in here earlier while I was out running, spinning around and kicking rocks. Carried our tarp all the way over there." He motions to the end of pit row, out toward the sand dunes and setting sun.

Chris Cantle & Michael Darter

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"Man, he's lucky I didn't know that. Because I'd've pulled him out of that seat by his hair and kicked his teeth down his throat."

Back at Jackhammer, things have gotten messy. Two trucks are hung up on the same ledge, side by side, wheels nearly touching. They're clobbering their rev limiters in a standstill drag race, teetering by the frame rails. A single-seater tries an outside path and lawn-darts into a crevice. It idles, rear end splayed. The driver gets out and crawls underneath, frantically stacking rocks behind the tires for traction. Another truck flips on its roof. Co-drivers are wiggling out of cockpits, dodging trucks and falling rock, attaching tow loops to anything that'll hold. Winches churn. The crowd draws closer.

More trucks are crawling toward the carnage. They're furious things, snorting and slithering up the trail. They jockey for position, gaining on the bottleneck. At the summit, trucks start to climb over one another, a free-for-all of churning beadlocks and flying silt and glinting chrome moly. This all unfolds within a hundred-foot radius. Each unique pace and approach and line affects another in this wild chess game of throttle and tire placement. Occasionally there's a rollover or a small fire.

Eventually, word comes down that a third of the grid is hung up at Jackhammer, a maze of winches and downed trucks. On the fly, race ops decrees that drivers on the lead lap take an alternate route and bypass the choke point. Slawson crosses the finish line soon after, teeth intact, to claim his second King of the Hammers crown. Three hours later, Pellegrino takes ninth place.

Scherer, Campbell, and 110 others DNF.

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Chris Cantle & Michael Darter

Each of the drivers I talked to after the race plans on coming back next year. The reason was unanimous: "The challenge." You hear that a lot in interviews, and it's hard not to be cynical. Jim Clark and Mark Donohue had a challenge. Eddie Sachs and Alberto Ascari did too. Next to ending up martyred, any other challenge seems hollow. Auto racing isn't a blood sport anymore and that's a good thing, if nothing else because there are far nobler things to die for. But it's left us in a quandary: how to keep the circus thrilling once the lion's teeth have been filed down.

King of the Hammers replaces the threat of death with that of failure. It's imminent and lurking and casts its own pall over the grid. It forces us to look at adversity, our reactions to things falling apart, and the lengths we'll go in order to put them back together. There's no gimmick; the drama doesn't feel manufactured. The attrition rate at this year's race was 86 percent, and it was all one hell of a show. Top-tier series could take a page from that playbook.

In time, the desert party and gunslinger grid and ruinous course will blend into one memory. Some of it already has. But there was a moment near Jackhammer that I still can't shake. The race had reached a feverish climax, all mayhem and metal and dust. A chase helicopter crested the summit, framed against the sun in a crisp California sky, rotors chopping at air like a Jimi Hendrix riff. The spectators were impossibly close. Red faces screaming, downing beer after beer. A truck plowed headlong into a boulder and came to rest 10 feet away from us. It cocked back and threw a haymaker, full throttle. Small-block effluvium filled my head.

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And so I stood at that mountain in the Mojave Desert, doubled over and gagging, sinuses coated with silky race-gas stink, while tears leaked down my dirty cheeks. I've watched Group B rally footage my entire life, hundreds of hours, envying the intimacy that spectators shared with those cars. I'll never know what a Quattro S1 or a Metro 6R4 smells like. Henri Toivonen died before I was born. But driving up Old Woman Springs Road and out of Johnson Valley, I remembered that footage. How the film always had a strange, beautiful sepia grain to it, like a dream. Now I know why.

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